Abstract: In this talk, we first present some elementary new proofs (using Cayley digraphs and spectral graph theory) for Waring's problem over finite fields, and explain how in the process of re-proving these results, we obtain an original result that provides an analogue of Sarkozy's theorem in the finite field setting (showing that any subset […]

The mean of a random quantity is supposed to confirm our expectations. What happens when it defies them? We will look at a few famous expected values; some old, some new, all great.

I will begin by describing a number of important examples of isometric actions of circles in Euclidean space and their restrictions to subspaces of Euclidean space. The goal of the talk will be to see how isometric actions of circles and tori can be used to "recognize" the space on which they are acting.

Abstract: Bats in North America have been dying off due to the invasion of a fungal disease (White Nose Syndrome). In this talk, I'll present a very simple linear algebraic model to predict the magnitude of the die-offs. By comparing these models to some data about actual bat survival, my collaborator and I also hypothesized […]